Businesses want their customers to communicate with each other. Communications between customers foster a sense of community and increase brand loyalty. Online message boards are perhaps the most common venue at which business customers meet. Customers use these message boards to discuss their purchases and obtain advice.
A great advantage of message boards is that they allow users to communicate with each other. A textual conversation on a message board, however, is generally not conducive to an in-depth exploration of a topic and does not lend itself to efficient collaborations. Such forms of user interactions are better served by real-time communications such as telephony or video calls. Moreover, because of the nature of message boards, a user (“poster”) who posts a question to another user or a set of users is not certain to obtain a response. Generally, on electronic message boards, there is no guarantee that the person(s) to whom the question is directed will ever return to read their messages. And even if there is a response to the posted question, there is no guarantee of a time frame in which this will happen. Therefore, from the standpoint of a user who needs to obtain information efficiently, it is better to call the other message board user(s) directly, rather than trying to communicate with them via the message board.
However, this is not easily possible because electronic message boards do not provide real-time communications capabilities to their members. It is possible for a user to post his or her phone number or other real-time communications endpoint identifier on the message board to invite others to initiate a real-time communications sessions but this method has several drawbacks:
One drawback is that the communications initiator may have to bear the cost of the ensuing real-time communications session, as opposed to the provider of the message board in whose interest it may be to allow users to communicate with each other.
Another drawback is that a significant amount of time may have passed between posting of the phone number or other endpoint identifier and the time when somebody (“responder”) decides to call the number. Often, the party who posted his or her number and the responder are not known to each other. Thus, when the party receives an incoming call from the responder, the incoming call is likely to resemble an unexpected incoming call from an unknown person and there is a good chance that the called party will reject the call.
A third drawback is that when the contact information of a person is posted on the Internet, the person has no control over who calls and when. Moreover, the person instantly becomes target for unsolicited calls and spam. This problem causes most message board users to choose not to make their contact information available to other message board users.
And a fourth drawback is that typically, there is no strong incentive for somebody to respond to the poster, especially in real-time. Therefore, any complication in setting up real-time communications with the poster can act as a deterrent that might make a potential responder to decide against initiating a communications session. Examples of such complications are having to look for a phone number in a post, key it into a phone (with the potential for errors and thus repeats), starting up a video communications client, having to log into it, etc.
For these reasons, the need exists for a method that allows the convenient establishment of real-time communications between message board users without making their contact information publicly available.